Frank O'Connor

What's the conventional wisdom about experimental fiction in America? It began with Gertrude Stein — true — and, as the Irish story writer Frank O'Connor once put it, looks funny on the page — often true — and then basically went underground —false. Some of our greatest writers after Stein employed techniques exceedingly experimental (borrowed from the early modernists such as Joyce and Pound) in novels that we rank as great — "The Sound and the Fury" — and in short stories that we writers who come after regard with something resembling worship — Hemingway's "In Our Time." So a writer such as Jesse Ball,...